Two decades ago, in The Ghost of the Executed Engineer (1993), Loren Graham told the story of a Russian coal-mining expert whose devotion to economic rationality and the welfare of his workers aroused the suspicion of tsarist officials. Unwilling to compromise his scientific principles under the Soviet regime, he was arrested on false charges of "wrecking," convicted in the first of the "show trials," and executed in 1929. The book demonstrated the state's indifference to the real costs of the Dneprostroi hydroelectric station, the steel-making center of Magnitogorsk, and the White Sea Canal during Joseph Stalin's First Five-Year Plan (1928-32). The disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, toward the end of the Soviet period, was only the most dramatic and visible failure of this flawed system.
展开▼
